Have a WYSIWYG editor which means
you can paste and click your way to a web page ? Thats great, but
do you know code ? I'm sure your asking ... I have a WYSIWYG editor, What
do I need to know code for ?

Two reasons, one the editor is limited
and two what happens if it makes a mistake ?

So how to figure out when it messed
up and where. There are many good tools that will help you do this but
often you can find it yourself . Just so you know I use a WYSIWYG myself
so not downgrading them here, but they do have limitations. All these codes
are disabled or they will not show here.

What is a web page ? It is a text document
that tells a computer browser what to do and how.

It looks like this:

!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"

This tells it what kind of web format
, there are many different kinds, if this is incorrect it will not display
right, as the formats wrong. Check me first is what it tells it. This is
one of the most common for text display pages. There are many others.

<html>
Where the hyper text mark up language,
starts, the directions to the browsers display. If this is missing, it
can't even get started.

<head>
Meaning me first.
This is where the metas live, see my
page on meta tags, no head means no place to begin. Search engines
get real froggy if this one is empty.
</head> means the head stops here.

<center>
Just like it says ... center on the
page for whatever it is in between the start and
</center> ..... = Stop centering.

Something not centered that should be,
check this. There are a dozen or more ways to center anything on a web
page, this is just the oldest and simplest.

img= SRC drgntonguebarred.gif
height =5 width= 6
A call for an image , its file
name , type and sizing to be displayed. Image not showing up or the size
is all wrong, check here.

<b> font face = Papyrus font color
= #000000, font size =5 </b> stop doing bold.
Words, in bold, what font , what color,
in this case white, sizing' then the word. Seems like a lot :)
? And it is, but the directions have to be very literal. You are talking
to a computer, they only can do what they are told, in exacts. Font or
color not what you expected, ? Check the coding for it

Same thing happening here, for a table.
What size, what colors for the background, how wide, where to start and
when to stop. Between the td /.......td is where you would put what you
want inside the table. Any part of this missing can make major havoc. In
a multi cell table, hint, if you must have an empty cell, put something
in it ,like a transparent tiny .gif or line of .......... the
same color as your background, to force it to stay open. Table doing really
weird things ? Check this.

Here it is again in a link, a href,
which just tells it that its a link and go out on the web and fetch. .If
the link is an image, which one , what size, and the alt statement, for
people who surf with images off, for speed or are persons with visual impairments.

The border what it says, you want a
band of color or empty space around the button? How much etc. etc.,
then /.......stop doing that. Links not working, check the http reference.
Spacing not right, border not right ? You get the idea here.

<br> or < li>
If things are jammed together you did
not intent to be, you need to separate them these are one way how it just
means a line, just like a carriage return on a typewriter. Or use another
transparent gif to force them apart.

To sum up:

< means start here ... doing whatever
you tell it to do
/> means stop doing it
= just like it seems, equals whatever
size, font color or call to action.
# means number, as in font colors called
hex numbers , each possible color as its own number, for example Number
sign and 000000 would equal black, Number sign and ffffff equals white
and all the variations in-between that are possible grades and mixes of
color, just like the color wheels you had in grade school. The quote marks
define out what the directions are, as in, equals I want you to do
this, with whatever is in the quote marks.

This is it, other than scripts, which
are just a short cut way of telling it to do something with out a long
drawn out explanation in html, which is why they are so popular, they have
gone beyond basic html, but they still must work within its parameters,
because its on Html's playground. Scripts have there own requirements which
I will go into details later.

Other languages like php, cgi, perl,
java etc. all have to be able to play by the browsers rules. But they are
much the same, they are a language.

Now you don't have to learn every nitpicky
little bit of this to build with an editor, but if there are problems and
you don't know what its "supposed" to do then you can't fix it. So boning
up on the basic language that you are using makes sense. Editors are great,
but they can only take the task so far and can't help a bit when it goes
wonky on you.